Places I've hung out in, sometimes briefly.

Archive for the month “June, 2012”

Don’t get me wrong, I like Lynch, Kentucky. I just wish that somewhere along the line, someone – business or government – had allocated money to preserve the outstanding ashlar stone buildings in the downtown. The two schools are heavily vandalized, but still have old desks and some remaining seats in the auditorium. It looks as if, one day, everyone just up and left the building, locked the doors and never came back. Both old school buildings are open to the elements and anyone else who might happen to wander in, like us, but we only wanted to take pix and shift. There’s a fine old Catholic Church, still going after all these years (100 years old!). And there’s more. Visit Lynch. Don’t look for a 7-11 or a gas station, though.
Here’s the 411 on Lynch:

U.S. Steel to Lynch: Nice knowin’ ya! Bye!

Here’s the old school (there are two side-by-side)

This is the Catholic Church:

This was originally a nice hotel. It’s apartments now.

There’s more to see, some things have explanatory signs (with a common grammatical error in at least two of them). There’s a 1925 train station, a tour you can take of Mine #31 and more. Lynch, Kentucky. I wonder if these ashlar stones are the handiwork of that group of Italian stonemasons that came to Whitesburg to help build the railroad?

You don’t see a lot of ashlar stone bridge abutments around here…the railroads generally went for function, not form. But this jewel on an abandoned, probably Southern, line at 36.37039, -83.00850 used to cross the Holston River between Rogersville and Bulls Gap.

You can just see my buddy standing there. He’s about 5’11”, which makes the abutment roughly 40′ high. There are two piers of the bridge remaining.

When the bridge was extant, it was most likely about 1,000′ long. Quite a piece of work.

You don’t? Well, that’s because it’s not there anymore. See that patch of reeds just to the right of center? That’s more or less where it was. If you go to Google Earth (download the program…it’s free) and input the coordinates 36.939900, -82.524877, you’ll see the location of this “lake”. Historic imagery shows it there in 1995 and maybe in 2002, but gone thereafter. It’s about halfway between Norton and Coeburn on 158, behind the Lonesome Pine Drive In which, according to a friend of mine who grew up in Norton, showed bluer movies that the other drive in movie in the vicinity.

There’s a bit of concrete and some iron protruding from the bank on the left. I don’t know what it is…thought I’d point it out.

is located at exactly 36.079145, -83.239861, about 3.1 miles southeast of White Pine TN. It’s on a long-abandoned Southern railroad line. I have no idea what it is. We couldn’t get closer to it on Sunday, June 3, because Douglas Lake was at really full pool. Rather looks like a windmill without the sails, no? I know it’s not, but I do know it’s on an old Southern line because, if you go back northwest just a little bit, you’ll see a spit of land jutting out into the lake…it’s the old rail bed, of course. About halfway up that spit, over to the land side, there’s a culvert that once crossed a creek. The culvert has, in tidy Roman lettering, “Southern Railway Company”. It’s someone’s backyard, now.
There were two lines coming through here at the time, probably before Douglas was impounded in 1943. There was another culvert under the spit of land we were standing on and, thanks to the diving prowess of a couple of kids who were swimming nearby, we learned that it also has the same inscription.